


there are many names in history and two of them are(n’t) ours

by azurish



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Family, Family Secrets, History, M/M, Secrets
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-03
Updated: 2016-04-03
Packaged: 2018-05-31 02:50:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,709
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6452494
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/azurish/pseuds/azurish
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Here is history: … History is Albus lying through his teeth about how he felt that morning – was he afraid, was he angry, was he righteous?  History is not heartbroken.”</p><p>When Albus is nine, not a day goes by in which newspaper headlines don’t proclaim his father’s wickedness to the world.  For the rest of his life, the lesson that some stories were never meant to make their way into the public record remains with him.  A character piece about truth, love, history, family, and the life and lies of Albus Dumbledore.</p>
            </blockquote>





	there are many names in history and two of them are(n’t) ours

 

            There are two months when Albus is nine in which his father’s name never leaves the newspaper headlines.  He thinks he may have seen “Percival Dumbledore” written out in the copperplate print of _The Daily Prophet_ more times than he has heard it said out loud.

            Percival Dumbledore gone Muggle-hunting is the scandal of the year.  His father is a monster; his father is a bigot; his father is everything Wizarding society ought to have left behind in the Dark Ages; his father is a criminal; his father ought to be locked up, tortured, killed.  It says so right there in plain old black and white.  Stark and definitive and public.

            A few enterprising reporters get the idea of investigating Percival’s family.  Bad blood will out, after all; who knows what sorts of horrors Percival has raised as children?  How thoroughly could a man like _that_ have indoctrinated vulnerable young minds?

            Kendra Dumbledore tries closing the door in their faces, so they wait for the boys in the lane, hide behind the garden fence, listen outside the window slats, try to ambush them at school.  One tall, bearded man finds Albus at the butcher’s one afternoon and pelts him with questions – What had his father told him about Muggles?  Does his mother hate Muggles too?  Does he?  How about his brother?  And where _is_ his sister anyways?  Albus feels his whole body grow hot, feels the vast sea of magic within him roil, and wants to _shove_ some of that power at the man, make him go away.  Already, he knows he could – he knows his accidental magic is far more potent than Ab’s ever has been – but he remembers what his mother said about not adding more fuel to the fire when he asked her why she doesn’t just curse the newspapermen trespassing on their property.  Instead he leaves the shopping unfinished and flees.  Kendra is furious when he tells her, but she does nothing to the man, who has followed Albus home and is now waiting insolently _just_ outside the gate.  Instead, she withdraws Albus and Aberforth from school, begs Bathilda Bagshot – who knows their secret – to buy their groceries for them, and holes up in the cottage with her sons and her daughter.

            Still the newspapers come every day by owl.   Kendra refuses to read them, but Albus has yet to learn when _not_ to seek knowledge or that sometimes it is better not to know.  He devours them.  It is a brutal education, the lessons etched into his brain with every column about his father’s degeneracy.  Some things are private, can never see the light of day.  History is what gets written down.  Sometimes the lies sit like sawdust on your tongue and truth is only a matter of opening your mouth, but you don’t open your mouth; the truth will not set you free.

*

            Elphias asks him about his father exactly once, on a lazy morning in the Gryffindor first years’ dormitory.  Albus, still in his pajamas, is bent over a volume on Arithmancy at his desk and Elphias is lying on his bed, staring at the ceiling.  The breeze coming in through the open window is cold and brisk, as if to remind them that autumn is only clinging on by the skin of its teeth and winter is nipping at their heels.  The cold stone floor had become too uncomfortable for bare feet over half an hour ago, but Albus is too hungry for the secrets this book is unraveling for him to bother fetching slippers.

            “Albus,” Elphias says, slowly.  There is something about the hesitance in his voice that cuts through the fog of numbers to Albus’s brain, and he puts his finger on the book to hold his place and stops reading.  “You don’t have to answer this if you don’t want to, but – well – I’ve been wondering, to be honest.  I’m sorry.  But – do you know _why_ your father did it?”

            God knows he’s been asked whether he knows his father’s motives – or, worse yet, been accused of knowing them and agreeing – dozens of times since coming to Hogwarts.  For a long time, it was all anyone seemed to want to ask Percival Dumbledore’s son.  But lately the school seems more preoccupied by the unheard-of feats he has achieved as a first-year, and he has been satisfied to note that the inquiries about his father have died down and been replaced with a different set of awestruck, admiring questions.

            But this is the first time _Elphias_ has asked.  The other boy is his friend – his closest friend at Hogwarts.  He might be small and scarred and socially-spurned, but he is brave, loyal, sweet.  He has seen Albus in the moments when he is neither Percival Dumbledore’s son nor the burgeoning wunderkind of Hogwarts – when he cried with homesickness the first weekend of the term, when he had an allergic reaction to the prawns at the Halloween Feast and vomited all evening, when he accidentally enlarged his ears to twice their natural size while trying to force himself to become a Metamorphagus.

            So he thinks carefully about how he is going to respond.  He hasn’t seen his father in person since the trial, but he can still picture his grim face, jaw clenched shut, the truth stoppered up behind closed lips.  The terrible price that has been paid to protect Ariana can never be taken back, and all that remains is to preserve what his father’s sacrifice has bought their family.  And this is another lesson, because he comes to the conclusion that there are things that are just too private ever to be shared, even with friends.  The monster that is the truth claws angrily at his chest, reminding him that every time he lies he damns his father further, but letting it out would do more harm than good.

            “No.  I don’t – no.  I wish I did.  He never gave any sign that he hated Muggles, and – you know me, Elphias.  I can’t stand anyone who has that kind of prejudice – I can’t stand that kind of prejudice.”

            “Of course,” Elphias says.

            Albus goes back to reading

*

            Gellert never asks him about his father.  Perhaps that should have been a sign.  Perhaps he already knows all about how history is written; he has already gained quite the reputation in his home country after all, and Albus never asks him about that, either.

*

            Aunt Honoria asks him quite bluntly at a cousin’s wedding reception when they are going to have a new Mrs. Dumbledore in the family.  The hosts have seated him with the older aunts and Aberforth with the younger children; even still, the wedding reception is the first time they have been in the same room since the funeral, and Albus’s nose twinges every so often when he think Aberforth is looking at him.  His brother has a mean right hook.

            “I know you’ve only ever had eyes for the smart ones, but surely there must be an eligible woman or two teaching at Hogwarts these days.  Or you wouldn’t be the first teacher to marry a bright former student – heaven knows you’re barely older than they are,” Honoria declares.  “But this dithering around hardly suits you.  It’s time to settle down, boy.  Your mother, rest her soul, isn’t here to tell you to find yourself a wife and produce a new generation of Dumbledores, so I’m here to do it in her place.”

            Albus winces, because there really is no good way to answer Honoria’s demands.  “I’m sorry, Aunt Honoria, but I’m a sodomite,” is not exactly appropriate for the circumstances, but “I’m still in love with a genocidal maniac whose misdeeds are just starting to make their way into our papers – and who, by the way, may have been responsible for your niece’s death” seems hardly better.  And “I’m fairly sure my heart has settled for life on a boy who never even returned my affections” is, perhaps, the worst of all.

            “Mmm, maybe someday,” he says instead.  “But I’m far too busy these days – still working on dragon’s blood.  Do you know, Aunt Honoria, I think I’m _this_ close to figuring out a way around Mallier’s sixth limitation on its use in healing draughts?”

            He can tell Honoria knows he’s fobbing her off, but he is equally sure she doesn’t know _why_.  There are, perhaps, three other people in the world who know about Albus’s feelings for Gellert, and neither Aberforth nor Bathilda Bagshot seems to know how deep those feelings run.  Gellert might, but then, Gellert knows all his weaknesses.  And after all, perhaps this part of the story is as much Gellert’s as it is his own.  But it is theirs – just theirs – and not for the rest of the world, with their grimy, grasping, guiltless fingers.  This is a story they have earned, with broken hearts and blood on their hands.

*

            After he defeats Gellert, he is exhausted.  He is wounded, he is fatigued, and he is almost entirely drained of power.  He collapses only a few minutes after they take Gellert’s limp form away; people are shouting and rushing around him, and this is the last thing he remembers before he wakes up in St. Mungo’s.

            He has slept for three days.  He stays three days more in the private ward he receives as hero of the Wizarding World, until he is forced to confront the fact that he really isn’t recuperating any longer and is just avoiding the outside world and its questions.  When he leaves, he is besieged by reporters the instant he steps outside the hospital doors.  For a moment, he feels as though he is nine all over again.

            But the questions are all wrong.  No one asks him what really matters, because no one else knows what really matters.  When he realizes this – when the sixth reporter asks him _how_ he defeated Grindelwald – there is a guilty part of him that sighs with relief.  Answering these questions is hard, but not impossible.  It is a matter of public record.

*

            Here is history:

            History is the spells he cast, the curses and countercurses he and Gellert hurled at each other.

            History is, perhaps, what they looked like that fateful morning.  The robes they wore and the set of their jaws.  History is the touch of white just beginning to curl its way through Albus’s beard and the stark red of his hair.

            History is the trial that happens afterward, the itemized list of war crimes the prosecution brings against Gellert.  It is Albus’s cool and unaffected testimony at the trial.  (It is not the way he avoids Gellert’s eyes and tries not to look at the cruel, wicked man whom Albus _still_ loves even as his guilt is being proved in the eyes of the law and the world this very moment.)

            History is Gellert’s life sentence to Nurmengard.

            History is Albus lying through his teeth about how he felt that morning – was he afraid, was he angry, was he righteous?  History is not heartbroken.

            History is the chapters in books that he begins directing people to when he is too tired to answer any more questions about the duel.  It is neat words pinned down on the page – first in newspapers, then in theses, biographies, textbooks.  It is not a summer day in Godric’s Hollow; it is not heated kisses stolen in empty lanes, teenagers fumbling at the fastenings of each other’s clothing in the dark.

            History is not Albus, who still lives and loves.  It is not the private hell of a man who still wonders whether the greatest tragedy of his life was a farce – who wonders to what extent he was being played like a violin and to what extent Gellert loved him back.  It is not messy and ongoing; it does not wake at four in the morning with nightmares, it does not wonder what to do with Gellert Grindelwald now (whether to visit, whether to write, whether to lock him away and pretend to forget).  History is not vicious and personal, still painful and raw years after the ink of the first monograph dried.

*

            On his hundred and first birthday, Albus has lunch with Aberforth.  They are getting to be old men now, and perhaps it does not suit them to be fighting openly at this age.  Still, Albus respects Aberforth’s honest, naked dislike for him; he would not appreciate any pretenses between them.

            During one of the many lulls in the conversation, Albus watches Aberforth chase the last remaining drops of soup around the rose-patterned china bowl with a spoon and wonders whether Aberforth knows the truth of what happened during the duel.  He doubts it; he doesn’t think Aberforth would refrain from telling him if he knew.  Either way, he knows Aberforth blames him in the end: even if he didn’t cast the curse that killed their sister nearly a century ago, he was the one who had brought about the whole charged, dangerous situation in the first place.

            The only sound right now is the clatter of cutlery.  He has asked about business at the Hog’s Head and Aberforth has asked about matters at the school.  They have not discussed any of the things that go unspoken – Percival, Ariana, Gellert.

            Albus wonders whether his brother knows that he hopes it was _Aberforth_ who killed Ariana.  He desperately hopes he himself wasn’t the one to do it, of course; there is a tiny, innocent fragment of his mind that almost believes he could not have killed Ariana, because it does not seem as though the universe could have let him go on living were there such a crime staining his soul.  If that were the case, surely he would have died as well; fate would have struck him down, wiped him off the face of the earth.  And he hopes it wasn’t Gellert, because what sort of being would he be, to love the man who _killed_ his sister?  Some nights, he lies awake after nightmares and considers whether it would be so terrible to know that Gellert had killed her – perhaps it would finally smother the aching part of him that loves Gellert helplessly even yet.  But he truly does not know how he would react to that knowledge, and he suspects it might kill him.  So he hopes Aberforth killed their sister, and he hates himself for it.

            He thinks Aberforth knows this, too, because his brother might not be as smart as he is, but he, too, has had decades to ruminate on that duel, and he must have considered what _he_ wants to believe.  He must know that Albus has run a similar thought experiment in his mind, and he surely knows Albus’s weaknesses well enough to know that Albus couldn’t bear to believe that he or Gellert had killed Ariana.

            He has never been able to figure out who Aberforth hopes had killed Ariana.  Sometimes, he thinks Abeforth _must_ hope it had been Albus who cast the killing curse – he knows the opinion his brother entertains of him and knows that he would see it as the ultimate substantiation of all his beliefs about Albus’s callous and vicious irresponsibility.  But sometimes he thinks Aberforth hopes it was Gellert, because that would be neater – the evil tyrant who killed their sister and then tried to conquer the Muggles.  Then Albus would play the role of hero – avenging his sister and saving the world – and this is a story history knows well.

            Aberforth knows too much of this tale to accept such simple fables.  But he, like Albus, also seems to know that some things are _private_.  Perhaps it is the fact that he, too, was Percival Dumbledore’s son; that he, too, grew up keeping Ariana’s secret.  He has never threatened to go to the press with the truth about Ariana or even the truth about Gellert, and Albus will always be grateful.  Aberforth understands family.  He understands that some secrets are meant to be kept forever.

*

            Bathilda Bagshot never especially seemed to like him – how could she, as one of the few people who knew almost all the truth? – but they are both celebrities in the wizarding world, more or less, and so they tend to rub shoulders at certain kinds of events.  Albus has been trying to use his appointment as Headmaster to avoid more and more of these sorts of to-dos, but it’s important to maintain some political clout these days.  This war against Voldemort isn’t just being fought between the Order of the Phoenix and the Death Easters.  There are battles to be fought in the corridors of the government and the back hallways of pureblood estate homes as well, and Albus has always been a careful strategist.

            This particular luncheon is after the convocation for the most recent class of Aurors.  Albus was invited as Hogwarts Headmaster, Bathilda because she has just finished a book on the history of magical policing.  Both are seated with the other guests of honor, and lunch had seemed to be going swimmingly – they had just brought out custard tarts – when a portly old wizard seated next to Bathilda turns to her and asks,

            “Does it ever bother you when you find out you missed something?”

            “I beg your pardon?”

            The man has the grace to look embarrassed.  “I mean, of course, not that you get much wrong at all.  But – isn’t  that just the nature of writing history?  You can’t know everything.  I mean, in _Hogwarts: A History_ – you can never know for sure what happened with Rowena’s daughter now can you?”

            “Or what the Founders were thinking when they added all those damn moving staircases to the school,” adds a strong-jawed woman sitting across from Albus.  “Bloody safety hazard, if you ask me.”

            “You must find so many forgotten pieces of history,” adds another witch.  “Even if you do know it all, you must leave some things out.  But how do you decide which unheard voices are worth amplifying?”

            “You hardly want a disquisition from an old bat like me on historical method at such a nice lunch,” Bathilda says, and she laughs.  “Historians tend to navel gaze about these things far too much already, and I don’t want to bore anyone into a postprandial doze.”

            But now the rest of the table is listening, and they politely insist that she is hardly an old bat, that they are interested, that she should continue; so at length, she does.  “You’re right, of course – when you’re in the archives, you realize that there truly is an infinity of narratives you could explore,” Bathilda explains. “So you realize that _all_ histories are interpretations – that it’s all right for you to select what you want to write about, with an eye towards what you think is most useful.  This luncheon, for instance – it’s an incident that happened, but no one’s ever going to write about it.  But the last banquet at the 1692 summit of the International Confederation of Wizards, when they produced the final draft of the Statute of Secrecy – that’s a meeting that mattered, if you want to tell a story that can help people understand how we got to today.  Both meals are facts, but only one is a _historical_ Fact, if you follow my meaning.”  She pauses, takes a sip of her water.  “So I try to figure out what stories need to be unearthed to help us understand how we got here and where we should go, because that’s what historians _do_ , and then I find out everything I can about them.  And if there’s some information that gets lost in the gaps – some constellation of facts that produce a story I haven’t elected to tell – well, I settle for writing down the histories that I think are important, and someone else can try to dig up the others.”

            For a moment, she makes eye contact with Albus, and he thinks that for once, they are in perfect agreement.  In her long and storied career, Bathilda Bagshot has never once written about the sequence of facts she is so intimately familiar with from her time in Godric’s Hollow.  It is not a piece of history that would be useful; it is not her duty as a historian to tell it.  It would help no one to know about the fragile, complicated humanity behind one of the most important duels of the century.  That story is long finished, its stakes settled, and no one but a pair of bitter brothers and a political prisoner care about it any longer; better to let the sacrifices that a pair of long-dead parents made for their long-dead daughter rest in peace.

            The elderly wizard who had spoken first hmms thoughtfully, but the woman who had asked about the staircases says, “Well, it seems to me like the history of those stairs would be one of those stories worth telling.  Founders probably thought they were having a proper laugh at all posterity’s expenses, I would think.”

            Albus smiles, although it doesn’t quite reach his eyes.  “I suspect there are several students at Hogwarts who would quite agree.  Perhaps a subject for a future edition of _Hogwarts: A History_ , hmm?”  The conversation drifts towards safer ground, as everyone at the table chimes in with their suggestions about what Bathilda could include in a future version of her history of the school, and Albus relaxes.  When it comes to the public record, he has nothing to fear from Bathilda Bagshot.

*

            When the Flumes first reach out to him about adding him to the chocolate card frog line, Albus is childishly, deeply delighted.  But when they send him the first printing of his card, the white letters proclaim that he is “particularly famous for his defeat of the Dark wizard Grindelwald in 1945.”  It is an especially common chocolate frog, and, despite his sweet tooth, Albus finds that he does not care for chocolate frogs these days.  After all, in the century since a nine year-old read every edition of _The Daily Prophet_ as his father was pilloried by the press, Albus has learned at least a few lessons.

**Author's Note:**

> I think I've now produced a fanfic that is peak Me, in that it's navel-gazing about history with bits of angst about Dumbledore, whoops. ~I am the gay relativistically contextualist intellectual historian your mother warned you about.~ Bathilda's fact example is lovingly ripped off from EH Carr, while the fic title comes from Richard Siken. If you want to yell with me about Harry Potter or historiography, hit me up over on [tumblr](http://azurish.tumblr.com/).


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